The concept of Anything Goes Marketing is simple: Don't let theories or best practices restrict you when it comes to marketing - specifically B2B marketing. We all know that in marketing, anything goes and if you don't, it's time that you did. Expect to find tips and tricks to improve your online marketing skills and some harsh comments for poor campaigns, articles and posts that I come across - beware!

Sunday, May 17, 2009

If you’re looking for an eloquently written post on how B2B marketing has changed and recommendations on what you should do, you’ve come to the wrong page. What I have done is reviewed the tweets from the latest SiriusDecisions Summit 2009 and captured points that I thought were interesting and categorized them.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go (not without trying!) but as you’ll see from the comments below, some great stats and thoughts have been captured by attendees via Twitter (yet another reason to use Twitter).

At some point I would like to come back to each category and focus on them specifically but for now, here is some organized Twitter talk for y’all – enjoy it:

Sales and Marketing Alignmentjblock: Only 32% of sales and marketing orgs work together to define programs for existing customers. @megheuer#sds09

megheuer: Sales is protective of customers and late-stage deals; marketing needs give options, not mandates, to help at this stage #sds09@tjaros

jblock: 72% of B2B orgs can segment the customers and prospects in their marketing database. @megheuer#sds09

amyblack: #sds09 prediction that social media will become more a function of product marketing as that group needs to have a dialogue with customers

Here are some quick thoughts that I’ve jotted down (more later - just went through 25+ pages of Twitter search results and need to reflect more on this):

Inbound marketing is and will be extremely crucial go forward but marketers need to develop strategies to target leads that are deeper in the sales/marketing funnel – especially in this economy

Importance of lead nurturing (no need to say more right now)

No mention of lead scoring - any comment on this from summit attendees?

Suppliers are looking for ways to help out their partners

Social media in B2B marketing is still at its early stages but expect this to grow enormously for the next summit

The key across all of these topics is sales/marketing alignment. It may also be the most difficult part.

Thanks to all of the twitters who passionately twitted at the conference and gave people like me some semblance of being there. Of course, muchos gracias to @siriusdecisions for bringing together great presentations and great people.